These Texans Are Turning on Trump--and James Talarico Is There to Greet Them

[hookaleft]

This is from an email I just recieved

“Hispanics are now becoming the final swing vote remaining in the country.”
These Texans Are Turning on Trump—and James Talarico Is There to Greet Them
“Hispanics are now becoming the final swing vote remaining in the country.”

WORLD CUP VIEWERS WATCHING the U.S. national team dismantle Paraguay 4–1 last Friday were treated to Telemundo’s play-by-play announcer Andrés Cantor unleashing his trademark “¡GOOOOOOOOOOL!” call as Folarin Balogun scored his second goal. At halftime, viewers would have seen a related Spanish-language political ad. Normally a vibe killer, this spot leaned into the moment. It laid out Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico’s views on Social Security and Medicare, education, and taxing millionaires. More to the point, it’s layered with footage of Talarico spending time with Latinos, ending with a shout of “¡TALARICOOOOOOOOO!”

The ad is running during the first batch of Mexico and United States group stage games, and is part of the Talarico campaign’s $800,000 ad buy. Chuck Rocha, an adviser to the Talarico campaign who got his start working for Gov. Ann Richards in the 1990s, said it was the earliest he’d ever seen a general-election candidate spend on Spanish-language TV since those halcyon days.

It’s a canny move.

Talarico’s chances for victory in Texas this November are real, but they will be determined by

whether or not he can win over Latino voters. The Trump administration’s disastrous handling of immigration gives Talarico an opportunity to speak effectively to voters who had been trending away from the Democratic party but may now be ready to abandon Trump. It’s a risk though, since discussing immigration opens up Talarico to Republican smears that he is yet another Democrat who doesn’t understand Texas.

Talarico performed well with Latino voters during the primary, winning 63–34 in counties where the population is 60 percent or more Latino. With his background as a Presbyterian seminarian, and with the Trump administration’s economic and immigration woes, Democrats believe he has a shot in a state that has repeatedly dashed their hopes.

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The Last Swing Voters
Trump made a 13-point gain with Latinos nationally between 2020 and 2024, but that rightward swing could be reversed this year—and if it is, Talarico’s race against the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton will be one place it’s likely to be visible downballot. If Talarico draws Latinos back to the Democratic party, it will be especially significant for a state where Latino voters have shifted further into the GOP coalition than in the rest of the country. Trump went from losing Texas Latinos 59–40 in 2020 to winning them 55–44 in 2024.

But that goodwill was dashed amid Trump’s immigration raids and cratering economy; according to an AP poll, more than half of Hispanic adults nationally know someone affected by Trump’s mass deportations. Among Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024, only 66 percent still approved of his job performance by this past April, according to a Pew poll. That’s a 27-point drop since Trump’s inauguration.

Texas Latinos too have soured on Trump: A May UnidosUS poll of 3,000 registered Hispanic voters, including 300 Texans, found one in five Trump-voting Latinos in Texas regretted their vote for the president (compared with only 6 percent of Hispanic Harris voters).

“Hispanics are now becoming the final swing vote remaining in the country not beholden to one party or the other,” said Jason Villalba, a Reagan Republican who left the party during the Trump era and now runs the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank that surveys Texas Latinos.

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Melting the ICE
Getting immigration right is critical for Talarico—and not because Hispanics see it as their top issue (they don’t: like many other segments of the voting population, their top issue is still the economy). Most voters want border security but don’t want to see their neighbors (or people who look like them) racially profiled, rounded up, or detained in bleak conditions. Which is to say, it matters both as a substantive policy issue and as one that stirs powerful emotions. Whatever Talarico says on immigration will be heard loud and clear by all Texans, and Republicans will amplify anything that makes him sound like a run-of-the-mill progressive.

As Lauren Egan wrote last week (go read her newsletter next if you haven’t yet!), the key to victory in Texas for statewide candidates like Talarico may be figuring out how “to excite the base while also making strategic policy choices—choices that reflect the broader preferences of the state and can win over, or at least not alienate, some independent and Republican voters.”

Talarico has been threading exactly that needle on immigration, hitting not just the administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, but also Joe Biden and other Democrats.

Talarico has repeated his stock answer everywhere throughout the campaign: “Our border should be like a front porch—it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door.” In biblically inflected language, he says: “We can both welcome the stranger—refugees, asylum seekers, and folks who want to contribute to our economy and pursue the American dream—and we can keep people out who mean to do us harm.”

On ICE, Talarico hasn’t minced words.

“We have to stop this secret police force of masked men in unmarked vehicles kidnapping children off our streets, executing American citizens in broad daylight—that has to end,” Talarico said in an interview on a San Antonio radio station. “We should be hunting down human traffickers, not moms and babies. We should be deporting gang members, not small business owners. We should be cracking down on the cartels, not our communities, and I think we all recognize how both political parties have failed us on this issue.”

He pledged, if elected, to fight for comprehensive immigration reform, “reining in this secret police force,” and building a secure and orderly immigration system that “reflects our values as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.”

For a statewide political candidate, this is tough criticism of ICE and its tactics, which may be by design.

Colin Rogero, a Democratic ad-maker for Conexión, who is not connected with the Talarico campaign, told me that in border-district races that he’s working on—including in Texas—it’s “ICE’s actions voters have a problem with.”

“What I’m seeing in polling now is people want border security [and] don’t have a problem with DHS and the Border Patrol,” he told me. What they really don’t like is “how ICE is executing their operations and the truth is when Republicans see it, they don’t like it either.”

Talarico vs. the Democrats
But Talarico has consciously created space between himself and national Democrats by hitting out against Biden and his party. When he debated twenty undecided Texans in his Jubilee appearance six months ago, he told one that he “will say what I think not enough Democrats have been willing to say: Joe Biden failed us on our southern border.” The following month, in a long interview with Ezra Klein, he spoke about the “utter chaos” his colleagues in the Texas House of Representatives from border constituencies saw as a result of Biden’s border policies. Even before running for Senate, Talarico told Joe Rogan that rather than age, Biden’s “biggest problem was ego. It was his inability to step aside and let someone else do the job” that hurt Democrats in 2024.

The Republican response to Talarico has been histrionic, presenting AI-generated versions of Talarico in a dress singing about transgender children or—I kid you not—sweeping the ground in front of the border wall and putting down a welcome mat for gun-toting, face-tattooed Latino guys who cheer for him before looking menacingly at the camera.

Both ads are products of Citizens for Sanity, a secretive outfit known for racist and transphobic ads and with ties to Stephen Miller and Trump’s inner circle. The group received a donation of more than $50 million from Elon Musk in 2022.

But beyond high-concept ads, Democrats worry that regardless of Talarico’s efforts to message carefully, Republicans will distort his comments to fit into a pre-existing progressive stereotype.

“Sadly, what happens is when he says we should have a big porch and a lock on the door, in this environment, they’ll clip out the second part and say he’s for open borders,” Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer and Democratic candidate for Texas’s 15th Congressional District, told me.¹

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) agreed that Republicans have only one route to victory in a race where Paxton is weighed down by a well-documented litany of legal and moral transgressions.

“If the election were held today, I believe James Talarico would be going to the U.S. Senate. And I think Republicans realize that they can’t make Paxton more popular. So the only thing they can do is try to bring James down, and that includes making up things about him,” Castro told me.

Castro isn’t alone in thinking Paxton’s flaws will make Texas Republicans desperate. Longtime Republican Artemio Muniz, a lawyer who also runs a manufacturing business, did not support Trump in 2016 but came back into the fold in 2024. As a Paxton supporter, he worries Trump’s immigration missteps could sway the Texas Senate race.

“[Trump]’s the one that controls the microphone, and the evidence of that is the Hispanic vote swinging in his direction two years ago,” he told me. “But right now is a critical moment. If the GOP believes the Hispanic vote is in the pocket of Republicans, they’re mistaken.”

Muniz said everyone he spoke to had been excited about the prospect of controlling the border and going after criminals and transnational gangs. The problems began when the government began deporting roofers and restaurant workers.

“Being part of the Republican party for so many years, if Republicans and the president don’t address this disconnect, I believe the Hispanic vote is one of these groups that will possibly swing back, and I don’t want to see that, I want to see Texas stay red,” he said.

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